‘Eighty Trips Around the Sun: Music by and for Terry Riley’ by Sarah Cahill Review

If any composer defies the stylistic descriptions that critics and historians assign as a necessary shorthand, it’s Terry Riley. Usually, the word “Minimalist” is reflexively applied to him, and not entirely without reason: “In C” (1964) and “A Rainbow in Curved Air” (1968), works with gradually unfolding structures and repetitive, burbling figures, introduced Mr. Riley, who was born in 1935, to an international audience when Columbia Masterworks released them on LP, and were among the founding blasts of Minimalism. Unlike most of his colleagues exploring similar techniques, Mr. Riley never distanced himself from the...